I started the chapter on Chania with a sentence which I wish
to withdraw (head lowered):‘Chania is
perhaps the most accessible of Crete’s big towns but, for our purposes,
identifiable places within its bounds are a bit limited ...’ In the second
paragraph I wrote, ‘It would obviously repay more attention than we gave it. I
suspect one should ideally stay in the town for a few days. ...’

We went
back to Crete in April 2005, staying in Chania for a week, not so much to give
the town another chance as to fulfil my urgent need to find Baroness Schwartz’s
house. Both missions were successful, and I shall give Chalepa, the suburb
where that house is situated, a separate section in this update to the Chania
itinerary. Any page numbers in what
follows refer to my book.

(p.263 insert at end of 2nd paragraph - additions
to the Archaeological Museum).

A second visit allows me to give a tweak or two to my
original text.

.I’ve written in my
notebook ‘Aphrodite and Eros;both
headless and armless;playing a guitar.
As usual her shawl has slipped.’ But who was armless? Who was playing the
guitar?

. another grave stele of a woman found at Aptera (4-3
century BC)

. nymph (headless) and basin, Kydonia (2-3 century AD)

. Lissos – girl not with ball but fruit

. another girl leaning forward – running?

. (add to p. 262) (not to be missed) Hellenic jewellery (4-3
century BC) from cemetery Kydonia:3
necklaces placed with the body ofSossima who died in childbirth

. (p.262-3) the Tanagra figurine is tiny, as is the woman
with v-neck bodice (both easy to miss but don’t)

. I couldn’t find again Hygeia from Lissos (p.262), but
there was a headless one (1-2 century AD) found at Aptera in 1905 – snake round
her shoulders and a pot in her hand. Marvellous draped frock.

(insert p. 263 after Museum) The bookshop whose virtues I
extolled at the harbour end of Chalidon Street should be avoided – hardly still
a bookshop.Try instead Pelekanakis
towards the top of Chalidon on the right (walking from the harbour). They might
even have a copy of my book!

(insert p.263 before wandering
aimlessly) Between the Cretan House Folk Museum and the Archaeological
Museum is the Roman Catholic Church dedicated to the Virgin.It is in the Capuchin Convent once attached
to it that Mary Walker may have stayed on one of her visits (see both p.265 and
my historical update discussing where Mary might have stayed, following a lead
by Amy Yule)

(insert p.263, last paragraph, end of 1st
sentence) We did go back to that restaurant but further along Zambeliou Street
is the Taman (a former hamam – bath house) at which we ate more often. I
suggested that this area, once empty of tourists, is the most picturesque; that
is because we had not delved further eastwards.

(insert p.264) Moving now further eastwards, which I only
did in a literary sense on my previous visit, I’d like to firm up on Catré
Street (not marked on many maps), as the location for Madame Hortense’s
activities. Turning right off Kanevaro Street into Catré, there is an enclosed
Minoan site, but it is further down on the left, towards Karaoli Dimitriou
Street, that we are headed, to the deserted, neglected and closed skeleton of a
hamam, opposite remains of old city walls. Climbing up the steps and walking
round to the side, you can readily imagine Mme Hortense and her light and
shaded life.

In Paris, in the same Greek
secondhand bookshop in which I had found a novel about her, I found a copy of Chronique d’Une Cité (1980) by Pandelis
Prevelakis which gives the fullest history of Mme Hortense, as she told it to
the humane French Consul in 1923. She spent 12 years working as prostitute in
Chania. Her earlier time with the admirals (p. 143) from her own lips makes
quite a read: ‘I was naked nine hours out of ten ...’ for several weeks.
(Incidentally, Kanevaro and Potier Streets do not abut, but form a sort of dog
leg with Catré Street).

Back on
Kanevaro Street, and further along on your left, is the main Minoan
archaeological site of Chania. I said (on p.261) that this site was open to the
public. It is not. That is to say, you cannot (or could not in April 2005) walk
around inside, but it, and the archaeologists at work, are wide open to public
gaze from the perimeter. By now they may have put on the proposed roof which
should allow entry.

Walking
further along Kanevaro Street, you come, on your left, to a series of much
later (Venetian/Ottoman) ruins cradled from behind by the remains of the city
walls overhanging the harbour below. How much of the destruction is due to
time, how much to a fire in 1897, and how much to bombing in the Second World
War, is unclear. But the governor’s palace, in both Venetian and Ottoman times,
was in this area.The Ottoman palace –
its upper stories of wood – was built partly on the site of the Venetian palazzo. Mary Walker describes the
setting pre-1897:

We were sitting in the large ‘sala’ of the
konak, or Government House, overlooking on three sides the harbour, the blue
expanse of the Mediterranean, and the distant headland of Cape Melec; through
the open windows came the health-laden breezes of that exquisitely pure
atmosphere, untainted by smoke of railway engine or factory chimney – breezes
perfumed by countless aromatic plants that cover the wild stretch of common
beyond the city. We could trace the roads bordered by aloes and cactus and
blossoming bay and myrtle;the ravines,
bright streams of rose-coloured oleander;and all the further spread of the plain – a dense mass of orange and
olive and mulberry groves, the golden crosses of the monastery of Chrissopighi
gleaming through the dark foliage at the foot of the Rhiza.

(The Khrysopiyi monastery still stands on the road from
Chania to Souda; Pat Cameron’s Blue Guide
tells you how to get there.)

I’m going to assume that Leyla, daughter of Crete’s
governor Pasha Ismail (1861-66) lived in the same government house. (The seat
of the Ottoman Governor was moved to Chania in 1850). Leyla will mean nothing
to you unless you first read the historical update above this one. In that I
introduce you to the English traveller Anna Vivanti, what she wrote about Mlle
Elizabeth to add to our previous knowledge (pp.264 and 131-2) and her pupil
Leyla (later known as the poet and composer Leyla Saz). This is how Anna
described Leyla’s appearance in 1865:

Although her father is a Greek by birth, the daughter was of the
Turkish type. She is short, and would be considered too stout with us, but has
only the en bon point indispensable
to a Turkish beauty. Her round face wore an expression of kindness and good
humour, and was remarkable for a pair of fine large intelligent black eyes. Her
dress was entirely composed of green silk, trimmed with crimson velvet. On her
head she wore a little round black hat, evidently an European importation, for
it was very much like those worn in England;it had a fine white feather fastened to it with a diamond ornament;and a brooch with the miniature of her
father, in a setting of diamonds a Queen might have coveted, sparkled on her
breast. This splendid ornament had previously contained the portrait of the
late Sultan, who had given it to the Pasha.

As well as her father being Greek, her mother was half
Cretan, so that Leyla had little Turkish blood. To come across this talented
fifteen-year-old confined to her father’s harem was intriguing enough, and to
learn of her relationship with the famous Mlle Elizabeth. But to read the
epilogue to her book The Imperial Harem
of the Sultans:Memoirs of Leyla (Saz)
Hanimfendi (1994) is, as a researcher, to be positively thrilled.

Before her arrival in Crete with her father, leaving her
mother and sister behind in what Christians still called Constantinople but
which was the Ottoman city of Istanbul, Leyla, from the age of four, was
brought up in the Sultan’s harem where her father was the chief physician. Her
account of life in the harem is not directly relevant to Crete, but her
grandsons, who edited the publication of her memoirs from the French version
(1925), added other notes, including some she had made about her life in Crete.

Leyla wrote
of sailing to Crete, presumably aged eleven, in 1861 when her father took up
his posting, on the imperial frigate Kayvan:

On the boat my father introduced to me a
Christian lady whose name was Elizabeth Verf. She did not know Turkish and I
did not know any of the languages she spoke. She was a well-educated person and
I was impressed with her immediately. She wrote down the Greek and French
alphabets and demonstrated the sounds they represented. During the few days we
were on the boat, I had learned the syllables in those languages.

When
we reached Crete she became my governess. She had a writing cabinet placed in a
small room where I studied with her every morning. I was spending the rest of
the day sewing and accepting guests.

Elizabeth
Verf, the Christian ladies of Crete and I would go to the sea-baths which were
a little outside the town. After we had a swim, we would find a rock on the
shore to sit on and she read me Robinson Crusoe. I could not understand all of
it. The whole summer went on like this. Then, in winter, my grandmother forbid
me the lessons. When the old lady returned to Istanbul, we continued our
lessons. The concubines in the house would often come and knock on the door
wishing to relieve me – they thought I had enough and was getting bored! We did
not mind them and continued with our lessons. I pleaded for a calligraphy
teacher and my father invited Esad Efendi of Candia... from the secondary school in Crete.

After
reading some literary books, I started scribbling some verses myself but I
never dared show them to anybody. One day my father noticed my writings and
asked me to recite. He liked them and I was very happy. He showed them to Sadik
Efendi who was the son of Kutbi Efendi, the famous poet in Crete. Gradually I
began to learn to write poetry and songs. Within one year, I had learned to
speak Greek and begun to understand French. The ladies of Crete would come to
me to have their dresses cut to measure.

Soon
after our arrival in Crete, I heard that Sadullah Bey had been married. I was
very sad but tried not to think much about it. I was asked to marry Hilmi Bey,
the son of Mustafa Paşa but my father would not consent.

In
the year eighty [the editor has put 1880 in square brackets, but must be
mistaken] we went to Istanbul on leave for two months and returned. While we
were making preparations to entertain Sultan Abdul Aziz on his return journey
from Egypt, his daughter Mürşide Sultan came to stay with us in Crete for
a convalescence. In eightythree [interpreted 1883] upon the encouragement of my
father, I wrote a poem for Sultan Aziz and sent it to the Mother Sultan. Sultan
Aziz liked it very much and sent me a gift of a coffee cup holder engraved with
diamonds. I also sent two songs to Fatma Sultan and heard that she was very
pleased. As a souvenir she sent me a medallion which I still keep.

Perhaps her father would not consent to her marriage with
the son of Mustafa Pasha because he would not only have been her uncle but
probably considerably older. I have come across no other writing of this period
of an Ottoman woman in Crete, nor indeed that of any other woman who was not a
foreign traveller. Leyla’s position was unique but her account does,
nevertheless, convey rivetting general sociological, as well as personal,
information.We will meet her again in
Chalepa when she writes of Baroness Schwartz.

As for Mlle
Elizabeth, these updates have added much to her personal life, and the
suggestion that she was a teacher, but not much to her political activities.
And I still have not got to the bottom of those (p.131). I did, in April 2005,
visit the Historical Museum and Archives of Crete in an attempt to do so. But
got almost nowhere. There is a file in Greek containing letters, among other
material, written by Elizabeth in the 1850s. At the time of my visit they were only
frustrating but I did note some English names:one, on 1 July 1858, is that of Ongle (sic) which must refer to the
British Consul Henry Sarell Ongley who was forced to leave Crete that year –
see historical update above about Henry and his wife Lucy. And a diary entry of
the same month and year mentions Lord Longworth who came from Istanbul when
Sarell Ongley was in hot water. The consul had been there 21 years and may have
had good political relations with Elizabeth;indeed, he may well be the key British connection that originally
alerted me to Elizabeth’s existence. (The Crete dates of the British Consul
Thomas Sandwith (p.131) should be changed to 1870-85).

Leyla
herself married an Ottoman administrator and man of letters of Cretan origin,
Sirri Pasha Kiritli, and travelled with him to his various posts in Anatolia,
the Balkans and Baghdad. In Istanbul, their residence was a draw for the world
of arts in which she held her own as poet and composer well after his death in
1895, writing her memoirs when she was seventy.

Just beyond
the remains of the governors’ palaces, at the northern end of Agio Markiou, are
those of a Roman Catholic Cathedral and the attached S. Maria dei Miracoli Convent,
built in 1615 by Marussa Mengano for Dominican nuns. Part of these ruins is now
a clearly marked bed and breakfast – Monasteri (E35 a night in 2005). There is
still enough of the unoccupied part to get a clear impression of the past, and
a bit of step climbing gives a good view of the Arsenali area beyond and below.

Wiggle your
way round now into the Arsenali quarter. At Karapatakis, run by a wife and
husband team, in Katechaki Square, we celebrated my birthday with a very nice
Italian meal – more of a dress-up place than most other restaurants.

The
restaurants built now into the old boatyards were a bit uninviting in April,
mainly because it was rather windy which seemed to have affected the staff. But
sit there with a drink and picture Jane Franklin (see historical update above
for more details and political comments). Here, in 1833, she spent her days of
quarantine. On 29 September, a note arrived from Capogrosso, the Dalmatian-born
British Consul, about a ‘tent’ arranged for her accommodation – one made of
‘sail cloth painted a pea-green colour lined with pieces of old chintz and
shawls. It was so hot, however,’ she continued ‘that I could not stop in it and
I placed my seat outside a dilapidated building which occupied the inner corner
of the harbour’.

Then and in the days that
followed she had a stream of visitors – names rather illegible – but they
included Capogrosso and his daughter, ‘a pleasant-looking married woman’. Her
visitors gone, she inspected her quarters in the lee of the Arsenali and noted
that it looked like rain – all a bit unpleasant and hazardous. She got wet and
felt unwell. The Health Inspector called and was surprised that she was not in
the tent. She explained that it let in the rain and that the wind was
boisterous;the tent might have blown
down in the night. I am paraphrasing all this because her diary is rather
difficult to follow.

On 1 October, there was an
invitation to dine from Mr Firmin Cousinery, a Frenchman, and his sisters, on
Thursday. The weather continued boisterous making it less likely that she could
leave for the island of Syra to join her husband as she was constantly trying
to do. Then you realise that she is accompanied by her maid who is unwell. The
diary comes to an end, leaving blank pages. But there is enough there, I think,
to picture the Arsenali in a new light.

Turn south now into the Splantzia
area, and here you will find much historical atmosphere and gorgeous little
houses, buildings and streets without the tourists that rather detract from the
old Western part of the city. In Kalinikou Sarpaki, you will find the
delightful restaurant In The Well of the Turk, owned and run by Jenifer
Perschke (closed on Tuesdays). When we were there and having a good gossip with
Jenny, she was planning to extend her operations in the area. If you wander
completely aimlessly in this area as the light fails, you can get rather
spookily lost as you hit the city walls and aren’t sure which way to turn back.

North east of Splantzia and east
of the Arsenali, there is a gap in the city walls, through which you escape to
a different atmosphere. Along here is Kum
Kapi, a seaside promenade and lots of open air cafes which are pleasant on
the right day.In April, in the middle
of a working afternoon, there were more Cretans than tourists – sort of jeunesse dorée territory. You could walk
from here to Chalepa along the front, linking up eventually with Venizelou
Road, but that is not the way we went. And Chalepa really does merit a separate
visit.

Chalepa

(Add to page 267, end of 2nd paragraph) I think
if I was going again, and not desperate to find Baroness Schwartz’s house, and
decided to walk rather than take a taxi (which would be a perfectly
understandable option), I would walk along the sea front. What we did was go the
Municipal Market way. (Do find time, perhaps on another occasion, to go to the
market which is good fun and the place to buy all sorts of Cretan herbs and
packets for presents and your own kitchen cupboard.)

The market fronts on to Venizelos
Square and you continue along Venizelos Road, which is not particularly
interesting, for a while. We then turned off down Koundourou Street, and so,
eventually, to the Schwartz house. But here I am going to leave the house till
last, to make it the climax of this jaunt.

So, along the sea front, you should come eventually
to Venizelos Road (further on from where we turned off), and continue up
towards Chalepa. Mary Walker sets the scene for us in the second half of the
nineteenth century:

We find ourselves winding upwards towards
Khalepa, and, in spite of the sun, which in these Southern countries is almost
as burning at its rise as at its meridian, the air is deliciously cool and
bracing, scented by the thyme, myrtle, balm, basil, mint, and a multitude of
aromatic plants, among which the pungent aroma of the ‘lavdanum’ predominates
... We do not enter the village of Khalepa, the residence of most of the
European consuls and the wealthy merchants.

Just as she was about to
leave Crete, and after a visit to Rethymnon and Candia (Herakleion) Anna
Vivanti ‘went to pay a farewell visit to Leila, at a country-house in Kaleppa,
where the Pasha had removed his family during my absence from Canea. I drove
there in the Pasha’s carriage, the only vehicle of any kind on the island, and
which resembled somewhat the Lord Mayor’s coach.’ Where that house is or was I
have yet to discover, but other Chalepa places are emerging.

If you have come by taxi, ask for the
Halepa Hotel (164 Venizelos Road). This was the British Consulate and residence
between 1888 and 1913, which Cretans call the Cretan Democracy Era. I
understand that there has been some out-of-keeping extension done to the
mansion, but the original, rather grand, is still there. This was not the home
of Lucy and Henry Sarell Ongley (see historical update), nor that of Thomas
Sandwith and his family. I still don’t know where they lived – Stephen Boys
Smith has tried to discover his great grandfather’s residence. But it was that
of the Howards – 1903-6.

Isabella
Howard (1867-1963, née Donna Maria Isabella Giovanna Teresa Gioacchina
Giustiniani-Bandini) married Esmé Howard (later Baron Howard of Penrith) in
1898. Howard, who until his marriage had led an unsettled life, adventurous
even, realised that he needed to retrieve the diplomatic path he had earlier
abandoned. He arrived in Crete as British consul-general in July 1903, leaving
his pregnant wife at her family home in Italy.That Christmas he returned to Chania from leave in Italy bringing with
him his new family. Isabella, whom he called Isa, was to stay in Crete until
the heat of the summer in 1905 when, expecting the second of their five sons,
she returned to Italy.It is not clear
whether or not she rejoined her husband in Crete.

The Howard family have done their
best to find for me letters that Isabella undoubtedly wrote home to Italy, to
her sister Elena and her niece Maria Sofia – without success. How would she
have described the palaeontologist Dorothea Bate (p. 165) who arrived at the
start of her expedition in March 1904 with a letter of introduction to the
consul-general? Dorothea was invited to lunch and started out nervous ‘but
found them all very pleasant,’ she wrote, ‘and easy to get on with. ... Lady
Isabella H is Italian but talks English quite well – Mr H seems quite ready to
help me which is an enormous relief.’ (An unfortunately incident to do with
fossils later impeded this relationship as Karolyn Shindler describes in Discovering Dorothea (2005).)

Esmé Howard, protecting Britain’s
interest vis-à-vis the Eastern Question,played a major role in the political upheavals in Crete of 1905 (p.145)
and remained there until November 1906. Thereafter he continued what became a
distinguished diplomatic career which he describes in his two volume
autobiography, Theatre of Life
(1935-6). In the second volume are some evocative passages, which I shall run
together here, describing his life with Isabella in Chania.

After Isa arrived with the baby and had
settled in, our life passed pleasantly enough. The spring was enchanting. We
rode our Syrian Arabs over the fields full of iris and red and purple anemones,
under olive groves and up valleys with running water, the banks of which were
covered with myrtle and oleander and cystus;we visited quaint villages with great plane trees in their central
squares in which blue coated Cretan men danced in circles on feast days while
the women, mostly in black, sat and watched;we went to see Arthur Evans’ wonderful excavations at Knossos, the
cradle of all European civilisation.

...The green and the flowers of spring gave way to the heat of summer, but
we never suffered at Halepa, for in the day we had a breeze off the sea and at
night a breeze off the mountains. Every day an old Cretan with a little mule
went up to the mountains and came back in the night with a load of frozen snow
to cool our drinks. We had nearby on the shore, only a few yards from the sea,
a spring of delicious water, to which we sent our small donkey with barrels
twice a day for fresh drinking water for the house. We were never short of
fresh meat, fish, vegetables or fruit, though perhaps a French chef would have complained of a lack of variety.

On one
occasion the Duke and Duchess of Connaught called in at Suda Bay in an English
man-of-war on their way back from India. They were accompanied by their two
daughters, Princess Patricia and Princess Margaret. ... We dined on board their
ship and they paid us a visit, delighted, as Princess Margaret told me years
after, with our drawing-room decorated entirely with peach or almond blossom.

I suspect that the other consulates, including the earlier
ones such as the American where the Stillmans lived 1865-68, during the
insurrection, were in this area. The nearby Hotel Dolma was the 19th
century Austrian consulate.

(Add to p.270, last paragraph) Continue up that incline and
you come to the former mansion of Prince George(p.270) and the family home of Venizelos which front onto Elena
Venizelos Square, named after the revolutionary leader’s second wife.

The Venizelos
Museum is worth visiting (open out of season, October-May
11.30-13.30;18.00-20.00 Monday-Friday). The house was built in 1877 by
Venizelos’s father, and the whole family lived there. On the ground floor, in
the room to the left of the entrance is a portrait of Maria, Venizelos’s first
wife (p.275).At the top of the stairs
is a photographic portrait of his mother, Steliani Plumidaki (p.272). Elena
(p.275), of whom there is also a photograph upstairs, lived here from time to
time – in 1927 (from when the contents and renovation date) and between
1933-35. The staff here were memorably helpful - Valia later sending me an
article about Baroness Schwartz.

Turn left
out of the house and walk eastwards (away from the direction from which you
approached Chalepa). You are headed towards Bella Vista, the house in which
Mercy Money Coutts (pp.170-1) and her family lived following her marriage to
Michael Seiradaki. It is also described by David McNeil Doren who lived there
with his partner Inga (p.271).

When you reach the big modern church of the
Evangelist (Evangelistria) on your
right, take the second little road opposite (northwards) down to the sea. At
the end you come to 27 Tzortzi Papadaki Street. It is a private house, so you
have to decide how much you intrude. The area is obviously not as it was, but
it seems quiet and pleasant and the view marvellous (though the house is no
longer called Bella Vista).

Mercy is a particularly
attractive character in the link between Crete, Britain and archaeology; and
she had more of a personal stake in Crete than the other women archaeologists –
summed up in her biographical details (pp.170-1). There, too, I mention how, in
1936, she helped Sir Arthur Evans organise the Knossos section of the London
exhibition to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the British School
at Athens. I have come across a book that adds to that story, and provides an
original insight, happily through a personal interview with Mercy. In The Find of a Lifetime:Sir Arthur Evans and the Discovery of Knossos
(1981; 1988), the archaeologist Sylvia L. Horwitz, tells how when 85-year-old
Evans needed an assistant for the exhibition, Mercy was considered ideal
because the often tyrannical Evans was too much of a Victorian gentleman to
lose his temper with a woman. Mercy had worked with him in the past, and she
got on well with him now.They only had
problems over the labelling of the artefacts. She wanted neat, unobtrusive
labels, he wanted big, bold ones telling the whole story of his remarkable finds.
Sylvia tells how, years later, Mercy

Wondered whether Sir
Arthur’s insistence on large labels was due to his own peculiar eyesight.Perhaps even with glasses he could only see
one object at a time and was not disturbed by the feeling of clutter in the showcases,
as other viewers might be. It was even possible, judging from the sometimes
overvivid restorations of the Knossos frescoes, to suspect him of not seeing
colors quite like other people. Still, she thought that the restorations were
justified and based on valid evidence, though the two of them did have one
notable argument over the famous fresco called the ‘Saffron Gatherer.’ The
young woman insisted that the Blue Boy was really a Blue Monkey. The old man
finally admitted that she might be right. ‘But of course by the next morning it
was a Blue Boy again!’ Admitting error was not easy for Evans.

In 1939, when Evans turned over his collection to the
Ashmolean Museum and arranged the artefacts himself in the Minoan room, Mercy
was at his side.

We had lunch in a perfectly
adequate little restaurant back on the main road, further eastward, not
memorable enough to recommend but I mention it in case you too are hungry by
this time; restaurants in the area are not common, particularly out of season,
but don’t despair.(I seem to remember
we caught a bus back to town from here at the end of our exploration;but you have more delights to come.)

Make your
way back to Elena Venizelos Square and walk a few yards south down Dagkli
Street which leads from it; on your right, you come to the Russian church, St
Mary Magdalene (pp.270-1) which will already have caught your attention. Prince
George’s sister Maria did visit Crete;indeed, the church was named in commemoration of her visit. And it was
inaugurated on 6 January 1903 in the presence of Prince George and their mother
Queen Olga of Greece (1851-1928).

But Olga’s
connection with Crete is rather more intriguing than her presence then. She was
born Grand Duchess Olga Konstantinovna of Russia, granddaughter of Tsar
Nicholas I and first cousin of Alexander III. She married George I of Greece, a
love match, aged 16, in 1867 –and bear
in mind that this was a time of insurrection in Crete when, as I have shown in
the historical update, the Great Powers pulled and pushed seeking advantage in
The Eastern Question. Russia’s relations with the Ottoman Empire were, to say
the least, strained. Amy Yule gives us this intriguing nugget in A Little Light on Cretan Insurrection:

Russia ... in the fertile brain of General Ignatieff
at least, had altered her game, and was playing for a smaller but more
profitable stake than any vague general scheme for the disruption of the
Ottoman Empire. The project in hand was to transfer Crete to the Greek Crown –
not State – as dowry and personal apanage of the Grand Duchess Olga, then on the eve of marriage to the Greek
King.

How much did Queen Olga of Greece know about that as she
attended the ceremony in 1903? Crete was not yet part of Greece and would not
be for another ten years.

The
distinctively Russian church is set in a large, unmanicured garden which has
become a playground for children who nick bread from the communion baskets, and
a meeting place for mothers and nannies. There is a Greek flag to one side of
the church, and the Russian Tsarist one on the other. A sign asking visitors
not to destroy the flowers and fruit trees seems an invitation to children to
swing on the branches. (On his departure, Prince George gave the church to the
Municipality of Chania and the Parish of Chalepa.)

A little further along Dagkli
Street, also on your right, look out for number 22 – a walled and gated house
and garden with a plaque outside telling you thatFlorentini
Kaloutsi (1890-1971) lived here. As we passed, the name meant nothing to me,
but I jotted it down because she was a woman and one who merited a plaque. I
have since run her down, and I’m very glad that she did not escape my
attention.

Following an English education,
Florentini emerged in Chania in the early nineteen twenties as a talented
painter. Inspired by the finds being excavated at Knossos, she decided to
depict the motifs on fabric – reviving, as she did so, the art of Cretan
weaving.The warmth with which her work
was received encouraged her to explore further, incorporating, for example,
Cretan folk themes. She had started out with one weaver;eventually a large workshop employed 150
women which, in 1925, adopted the name ‘Double Axe’, the Minoan goddess symbol.
In the years that followed, their output was exported and exhibited throughout
Europe and the USA garnering prizes. The showroom in Athens is run by the third
generation of the Kaloutsi family. I have not been able to lay my hands on Florentini Kaloutsi and the Art of Crete
from the Minoan Period to the Present by Z Mitsotaki (Benaki Museum, 1999).

Continue
walking a few yards further. Just past the turning to the left - Katsanevaki
Street - indeed, on that corner, you cannot miss Baroness Schwartz’s house
(pp.134 and 267). I understand it is still in the same state as when we
‘discovered’ it in April 2005 – very much a highlight of our several visits to
Crete. There have been plans for some time by the Prefecture of Chania to
restore it and use it for cultural activities but it would be a major job and
require a fortune. There it stood – an absolute ruin, set in a wild garden of
poppies and daisies; nature had almost reclaimed it.

Somehow
this abandoned and neglected ruin fitted the romantic story of Espérance
Schwartz. If something is not done it will soon be lost;if something is done, it must lose some
magic!

In its
heyday, this house must have been impressive, even among the fine mansions of
the area and, during the insurrection of 1866-9, Espérance turned it into a
revolutionary hotbed. Which brings us back to Leyla the daughter of Pasha
Ismail, the Ottoman representative against whom the insurrection was
directed.

At the end
of the passage that I quoted from above about Leyla’s life in Crete, she
wrote:‘During the local revolt in
Crete, I was the translator and secret secretary to my father.’ This adds
definite spice to the stories of politics and insurrection. The following
paragraph reads:

At any rate, my life in Crete was not in vain.
Foreign ladies resident in Crete and travelling ones passing through, used to
visit and stay with us. I had met the Countess Tene who was later condemned to
death in Tripoli. Madame la Countess de Schatz [Schwartz] who resided in Crete
liked me very much. One day she saw my head-gear and asked me what it was
called and I replied ‘Garibaldi’. She happened to be a close friend of
Garibaldi and they were corresponding with each other. Soon after, she conveyed
me his greetings.

Did Leyla come to know of Espérance’s revolutionary
activities, and that her father forbade her to leave Chania after one of her
escapades? Did a charming friendship falter? Who knows, but it is a neat
example of life being rather more shaded than it is black or white. As for poor
Countess Tene, I cannot find out anything about her or permutations of her
name. Can anyone help?

The article I later received from
Valia at the Venizelos House dates from 21 September 2003, appeared in Kathimerini, and was written (in Greek)
by Peggy Kounenaki – (kindly translated, as usual, by my Cretan friend Emmanuel
Voyiakis). It adds some new points about Espérance and her relationship with
Crete. Of the insurrection, Peggy writes ‘It is not accidental that during this
time a whole swarm of Garibaldian fighters came to fight on the side of the
locals, as Schwartz herself had asked from Garibaldi.’ She also writes of
Espérance’s ‘affair’ with the Greek consul in Crete, Konstantinos Voulgaridis,
which was to ‘prolong her stay in the island indefinitely.’ As a young woman,
Espérance was ‘beautiful, clever, very well-educated ... and above all very
rich.’

Another
Cretan relationship was, perhaps, more platonic: ‘Under the charm of the Cretan
landscape, she invites and finances the young painter Joseph Winkler, a rising
member of the Munich school. Winkler tours the three prefectures of the island
and creates twelve exceptional landscape paintings of Chania and Rethymnon.
However, all these paintings are now considered lost.’Peggy says that Espérance (under the pen name
Elpis Melena) published in Greek in 1891 a book which, if it had been published
in English, would be called something like Events and Notes on My 20-Year Stay
in Crete;but a year later it was only
published in German. I have not, unfortunately, been able to find a copy (there
is one for sale on the internet for nearly £700!) but it apparently contains
Winkler’s paintings; Espérance later claimed that she paid ‘far too much’ for
them.

Peggy
writes too of Espérance’s diplomatic visit to Rome on Crete’s behalf and her
meeting with British Prime Minister William Gladstone (p.136). But it was
‘without success’. And Peggy continues:

She will share her disappointment with Garibaldi,
whom she tries to convince to come to the island in order to help the
situation. Old and battered from arthritis, he responds:‘An enslaved people is fighting so near to me
and I am impotent ... the shame of it!’ This is one version of the position of
the Italian revolutionary.In her visit
to the last Cretological Conference, descendent Anita, director of the
Garibaldi Museum in Italy, presented evidence that her great-grandfather had
come incognito to Crete for two weeks, but had to leave after he received an
urgent letter from his father.

Another mystery still to be unravelled!

(Environs of Chania – chapter 21)

Alikianos

(p. 276) I have been caught out here! Although we drove
through it, and hoped to find the remains of the ‘Molino Castle’, we failed. I
assumed that two other sources from which I drew had been more successful and
that I could depend on their account ofa lintel and its inscription, ‘Omnia
Mundi Fumus et Umbra. Then I came across a tough review of one of those
sources by a scholar of Crete (Stelios Jackson) taking to task the two sources
– one a guidebook, the other a traveller. While there are remains, neither the
lintel nor the inscription exist.

In forming
my correction, I have been initially further confused, and then helped, by the
authors of Candia Veneziana: Venetian
Itineraries Through Crete who, in their book published at much the same
time as mine, wrote:

On the architrave of the main doorway of the old tower there was the
same inscription as that found in palazzo Clodio at Arghiroupoli:

OMNIA MUNDI FUMUS ET UMBRA

(All things of this world are nought but smoke and shadows)

The palazzo is now in a totally ruined
state. A lady helps us to locate it in the old part of the village, in the
Fanari area, where it stands beside the small Byzantine church of Agios
Georgios, behind a modern house and hidden under a thick blanket of ivy and
thorn bushes. It seems hardly possible that these ruined walls might have been
the setting of a love story and acts of cruelty that occurred in the distant
past but are still recalled today all over the island.

When I wrote to Alberta
Galla, one of the authors, with the doubts that had been raised about this
inscription (without telling her how forcefully, since I was questioning her
account!), she replied:

We went there for our researches for Candia
Veneziana but we saw only an arch and some ruins. The house, as Gerola [early
20th century scholar of Crete’s Venetian monuments] reports,
belonged to the Venetian family Dal Molin but he doesn’t mention any
inscription. Stergios Spanaki in his ‘Choria and Poleis’ statesthat probably,
as in most Venetian villas, there was the same inscription 'omnia mundi fumus
et umbra’ as in Arghiropoli, which we saw on the magnificent gate of palazzo
Clodio.

To strengthen his opinion he, most
humorously, has immortalized himself in a picture of the ruins of Alikiano
villa with the title ‘fumus ... et umbra’.Spanaki, as you probably know, is the most important scholar of Venetian
Crete, exegete of Gerola and translator in Greek of a big amount of Venetian
documents (Relationi etc.) Shall we trust him?

Where Alberta and her
co-author’s account of the castle remains differs from mine is the word ‘was’
which her email to me explains. I, and my two sources, stated that it ‘is’
there now. There is no lintel and no inscription now – only an arch and some ruins.
Do find them! Argyroupolis, south west of Rethymnon, with its lintel andinscription, is also a possible
location for the Kandanoleon wedding tragedy.

I thank Alberta for the trouble she took to answer
my emails on that and other points, and recommend her compact, scholarly and
accessible book which should be available in Crete. And I thank Stelios Jackson
for enabling me to confess to him my error before he could review my book, and
to explain that, knowing I had failed to find the ruins, I did approach the
traveller to check details, but had no reply.

While you’re in Alikianos, picture it three and a
half centuries after the fatal wedding breakfast, as it was in Mary Walker’s
day under the Ottomans;she wrote in her
second Crete account, Old Tracks and New
Landmarks (1897):

We gradually approach a more wooded region,
and at length, reaching the village of Alikianos, we feel stifled amongst the
dense foliage of orange and olive groves. An orange grove in these parts – its
poetical associations notwithstanding – is by no means, on nearer acquaintance,
always the scene of enchantment dear to the poetic mind. On level ground it is
dull, and unquestionably stuffy;nothing
grows in the dark shadow of the heavy canopy of leaves, therefore the bare
ground is varied only by the small ditches surrounding the black trunks for
irrigation, and the whole is enclosed by an uninteresting stone wall. ...

As
we wound along the airless and sultry lanes ..., we found the caimakam of the
district, warned of the approach of the party, had ridden forward, followed by
his secretary, to invite us to his fortified konak on the summit of the hill.
It is a stiff climb, but we are repaid by the splendid view from the
battlements of the surrounding country, and refreshed by lemonade and English
biscuits. The whole of this part – frequently under water in the winter – is
very feverish;two or three of the
soldiers of the small garrison – although the castle is raised above the level
of the marshes – were suffering unmistakably from this terrible scourge of
ill-drained lands;but the conditions of
existence seem to agree wonderfully with the orange-trees, which are, they say,
the finest in this part of Crete.

So I am left with another
question, is there any sign of that konak
left? Do let me know if you get there before me.

Armenoi

(insert p. 283) In 1865 Anna
Vivanti, like us in 2001, had a meal in Armenoi, en route from Chania to
Rethymnon, and wrote:

After three hours’ ride we arrived at
Armenos, a hamlet, where we halted, and Sali and Arif unpacked some of our
provisions. I never enjoyed a lunch more. It consisted of cold chicken, hard
boiled eggs, oranges, and Turkish coffee, and we partook of it in the shade of
a splendid plane tree, on the borders of a clear murmuring stream. On leaving
Armenos, the country became wilder, and the roads even worse than they had
been;an ascent of about half an hour,
the whole country around was strewed with fragments of rocks. It would have
looked terribly wild and desolate, had not the wild flowers and plants covered
and hidden a great deal.

(Tylissos
– Rethymnon - chapter 18)

(insert
pp. 240 and 242) In the book, the order was Eleutherna (archaeological site),
Arkadi (Monastery);on the ground, in
April 2005, it was more practical to visit the monastery first. (Following the
itinerary in the book, you would have driven east to west via Anogia. On our
second attempt to complete this itinerary, we were driving from Chania; indeed,
I suggested (p. 240) approaching this part of the itinerary from the west.

In the morning, we by-passed
Rethymnon on the east to west highway looking hopefully out for signs to the
monastery. Then we had to double back. In my notes I have written, ‘To get to
Arkadi and Eleutherna, don’t wait for the signs off the main highway; only one
appeared – a dud. Instead, get onto the old Rethymnon Road once past the town,
and there will then be signs.’ Of course, signage may have improved by now. It
is then an attractive drive, but you still have to keep your direction wits
about you.

Arkadi Monastery

I’m
glad we finally had a chance to visit this historic site. On the patchy green
space near the car park were a dozen or so head-scarfed women (and one man)
collecting horta, and happy to
explain themselves. They conveyed a timeless quality that was a pleasing
introduction. Inside the walls you might be surprised to find a well-visited
site that doesn’t jar. This may well be because although many visitors are
tourists, others are pilgrims. And they visit not so much for its purely
religious connotation as because of the destruction and massacre of November
1866 during the 1866-69 uprising against the Ottomans. That is why we were
there: because of the hundreds of women and children who died (p.133)

Some of the structures built round
the rectangular courtyard – with the church and its famous facade in the middle
- have been restored over the years since 1866, though only one part was
actually blown asunder in the explosion; but the whole seems to have the patina
of centuries. A museum is devoted to 1866 and there one meets individual women
who were involved. The best-remembered is Chariklea
(Hariklea) Daskalaki from the nearby village of Amnatos whose three sons
were killed in the uprising. During the two-day siege of the monastery, she not
only urged on the few armed fighters but did what she could to help the
defence.

Artistic depictions of the siege and
the final destruction show women taking part. One that illustrates Arkadi:the Historic Monastery (on sale there) shows one woman heaving a
large brick and another brandishing a sword.

Chariklea survived the siege – many
who did not die in the explosion were slaughtered – and was taken as a prisoner
to Rethymnon under terrible conditions. The women and children were kept for a
week in a church and then, it seems, released; the men were imprisoned for a
year. Upon her release, the monastery information suggests that Chariklea went
to her daughters in Athens where she died, apparently that year -that is, within weeks of the siege.

But Hilary Skinner, the British Philhelline
who arrived in southern Crete on board the blockade-runner Arkadi in January 1867, two months after the monastery tragedy, to
help the insurgents, tells a different story. He writes in Roughing it in Crete in 1867 (1868) of meeting the wounded Cretan
leader George Daskalaki a few days after his arrival and being told that if he
wished to see the monastery ‘his mother could go with us; she had been in the
siege and could tell all about it.’ (Skinner later learned that Chariklea’s
‘brave’ son was ‘doomed’).

As they approached the monastery,
Skinner continued, ‘The old lady who had escaped the slaughter, shuddered when
she saw it.’ Bodies still lay about and he describes how in one room a ‘woman
clings to a child as if to protect it, and another, with a look of terror,
which has not yet faded from her face, turns her head away to avoid the
threatened blow.’ Chariklea tells him that a hundred other women were spared
but that ‘thirty of her kinsfolk perished around her, and she relates with
tears how one grandchild, six years old, was cut down before her eyes’.

Outside
the west gate of the monastery is the Heroes Monument – an ossuary made of
stone salvaged from the explosion where the bones of those who fell are kept.
And there, among the busts of heroic male leaders, is one of Chariklea
Daskalaki.

Hilda Pendlebury (p. 242) shows how
the monastery and its gracious receipt of visitors revived. And I understand that
the monastery still offers visitors hospitality.

Eleutherna (Eleftherna)

The Arkadi Monastery may not be that easy to find – we
overshot it to begin with – but the way in and out of it makes getting to the
archaeological site of Eleutherna easy, for it is sign-posted there, and for 8
kms you simply have to keep your head, passing through the village of the same
name, and then down an interesting (i.e. rough) winding road. Keep your eyes
skinned here and be ready to park before you get to the bottom – you may well
be the only car – because, at least when we went in April 2005, that is all you
will see of the site. It’s an excellent spacious view, as the other side of the
valley rises and spreads before you covered with archaeological remains, but
the site is fenced in and you end up at a padlocked gate from where you see
very much less than you did while descending into the valley. I hope it is not
always locked, that we were unlucky.

Hilda
Pendlebury’s 1929 description (pp. 240-1) throws you back to a time when the
archaeological treasures were waiting there, still mostly under the soil.

Rethymnon

(insert p. 243) We didn’t visit the
Melidoni cave on this trip either; instead, after Eleutherna, we turned back
towards Rethymnon and sought somewhere for lunch;I had to make a better fist of the town than
I do in the book, and there is only so much you can do in a day.

If you have set your heart on
visiting the Archaeological Museum, you need to get to it well before the
closing time of 15.00;it was closed by
14.50 on a Saturday and we missed it and, therefore, among other finds, a
rather fetching Roman Aphrodite from Argyroupolis and a late Minoan clownish
goddess with upraised arms from Pangalochori. Rethymnon:Soul of Crete
(2002), with a useful text by archaeologist Stella Kalogeraki, and handsome
illustrations, is a good guide.

The Eleni Franzeskaki Collection
I mention (p.245) is in the building opposite the nearby Municipal Kanakakis
Gallery for contemporary art in Chimaras (Heimaras) Street, and the Historical
and Folklore Museum is 28-30 Manouil Vernadou. Avoid Saturday afternoon out of
season, I suspect.

Leaving the
Archaeological Museum, the entrance to the Fortezza now faces you. This
extraordinary construction still dominates the town, lowers over it;and it is like entering a town itself but
without much in the way of buildings. It did once have public buildings within
and, indeed, there was an unsuccessful attempt by the government in Venice to
get families to live inside the walls – forbidding the construction of new
houses without – but the women demurred, preferring not to live in such close
quarters with soldiers. So now it is just a vast, walled, windswept, rather
desolate space with the odd remains of a building, high above the town, with
splendid views all round. If you go in the summer, at the time of the
Renaissance Festival, I’m sure the atmosphere is different. In the Erifoli
Theatre – an open air amphitheatre – there are concerts and plays, Greek, of
course, but also other European classics such as those of Shakespeare and
Molière.

As you roam around the Fortezza
at less celebratory times, imagine the Venetian women taking refuge there from
the Ottomans during the siege of September-November 1646 (p. 116). (I see on
page 244, I say 1645 – that is when they started to besiege Chania). And
imagine their last view of the town, for ever. Two centuries later, in 1865,
Anna Vivanti arrived, and wrote of the town:

It lies on a promontory, which ends in a cliff, on
which a fortress is built that looks strong and foreboding. There are no
gardens here like in Canea, the shrubs and trees here and there are stunted,
and grow in a horizontal direction, as trees and shrubs will do near a
sea-shore which is exposed to high winds. One solitary palm-tree is an
exception;it stands in some little
garden in the town, and rises high above the houses, waving its graceful
leaves. ‘What is this town here for, in this stony wilderness, on a rocky
coast, with but a small harbour, which can be entered in fair weather only?’ I
asked our host, M. G-. He told me that behind these mountains are fruitful
valleys full of olive-trees, the fruit of which the peasants bring to Rettimo,
where it is made into oil and soap. We visited one of the many soap
manufactories in Rettimo;the soap was
very nice and pure, and I heartily wished that it had been more extensively
used in the island, instead of being exported to Constantinople, Trieste,
&c.

Mr G, The ‘English’ vice-consul was an Ionian Greek with
whom they communicated in Italian. Anna’s description of his family gives some
idea of Rethymniot women then:

Mr G-‘s wife, daughter, and daughters-in-law understood nothing but
Greek. I could, therefore, only speak with them by signs, and as one can convey
but very simple ideas by that mode of communication, we did not tell one
another much. They were dressed in a way that was a mixture of primitive
simplicity and gorgeous finery. With a plain cotton dress, and a handkerchief
tied round the head, they would yet wear splendid diamond ear-rings, pearl
necklace, bracelets, etc. There was the same incongruity observable in their
houses, which were wanting in many of what seem to us the very first and
indispensable comforts of life, while the beds had gold embroidered counterpanes.
With the children I got on better than with these ladies.

How
far had Rethymnon changed by the time the writer Lilika Nakou (Nakos) arrived
as a teacher seventy years later, in 1933? When my book was already at the
proof stage, having come upon a brief reference to her, I googled her and found
Deborah Tannen’s Lilika Nakos (1983),
a survey of the writer’s work. Although I was able to add a few words about it,
the book itself did not arrive until too late to tell you more about Lilika and
her writing. Since then, after much searching, I have also found a French copy
of her novel based on her Cretan experience - Madame Do-ré-mi: Professeur en Crète (1956) - on the internet (in
Holland). It is so delightful that I can’t believe that it hasn’t been
translated into English; (originally written in French (1947), Lilika also
published a Greek version (1955)).

Deborah
Tannen describes how, after the ordeal of the German occupation of Athens
during the War, having lost everything, Lilika arrived penniless in Lausanne.
There a friend told her that a Swiss magazine wanted her to write a humorous
story about Crete.

Born in
Athens, Lilika had spent her early childhood there, followed by spells in Switzerland,
where she was educated and was part of a bohemian and literary set and had a
love affair with a leftist historian, associate of the Cretan revolutionary
Venizelos (p.145). Later she worked in Paris, again among writers. Her first
publication, in 1928, was a story translated from the French into Greek by
Crete-born Galateia Kazantzakis (p.194). Against her father’s wishes – writing
was not a suitable occupation for women – she was set on a literary career. But
his death in 1933 left his wife and daughter not only without income but also
in debt and with no means of support. That is how she came to leave Athens,
where she had started writing in Greek (she was one of the first to write
novels in modern Greek), and take up a teaching post in Rethymnon – calling
upon her Swiss degrees in music and belles lettres and her father’s
connections.

Because the
novel has no English version, as far as practical I shall tell Lilika’s Cretan
adventure, particularly her impressions of Crete and Cretans, in her own words,
or, rather, those of her alter ego twenty-one year old Katerina Makri.
Katerina’s arrival in Rethymnon sets the scene and introduces us to Herakles,
the larger-than-life school factotum who was to take her under his wing:

The following morning, at about 10 o’clock, Rethymnon appeared, girdled
by Venetian walls, with sullen houses dominated by the lighthouse and the two
or three Turkish minarets. My distress hit me, and my courage abandoned me.
Strapping fellows with carefully-dressed beards and sinister black moustaches,
and dressed in their baggy blue pantaloons, shouted and gesticulated from the
long boats. They accosted and boarded our boat like pirates, springing up from
the deep by a trembling ladder. Prey to a nameless terror, I hurtled down to
the smoking room and fell to the carpet.

‘Where is Katerina Makri?’ called out a voice of
thunder. ‘Where is she? She’s our new school teacher.’

Herakles finally tracks her down and carts her off towards
the school (and Anna Vivanti’s earlier description of a leafless town is partly
explained):

At last, leaving the main road, we ventured into
narrow streets bordered withwalls
higher than the tree tops. Through the grilled gates you could see delicious
clusters of almond trees, orange trees in flower and cypress. Right at the
back, hid the houses covered in jasmine and honeysuckle. No window looked onto
the street, no chance ofan indiscreet
glance out. ....

[Herakles explained] ‘This is the Turkish quarter. The muslim houses
don’t have openings onto the street so the women can’t amuse themselves by
seeing what’s going on. Since the exchange of population [in 1923 – p. 148], after the war [1918], Christians live here’.

The whole journey is physically hot and tiring and
emotionally oppressive; Katerina moans to herself: ‘What wouldn’t I have given
to be transformed into a hanoum
[Turkish woman], cloistered in these gardens, without having to confront the
headmaster and turbulent pupils!’

They arrive
at the school where the headmaster, it turns out, is sympathetic, though
doubtful that she will be able to cope; and he stands by her almost to the end.
But what he tells her about her pupils appals her:

They are ill-disciplined and brawling. You will see them with knives or
revolvers at the waist and they don’t hesitate to use them, even in class.In addition, because there are too many of
them, teaching is very difficult, if not impossible. But I would be unjust to
them if I didn’t also tell you about their qualities. They have generous
hearts; these are men with a chivalrous side to them, a grandeur of feeling,
and a love of panache. They are proud and gentle at the same time;they have great amour-propre and, if you are
able to get to them, you will be loved and respected. They love that which is
large, heroic ...

I felt lost:I was only one metre 45 tall. If the esteem of my students was measured
by my height, what a disaster!

The oldest pupils were, indeed, men – men who had already done their
military service and come back to their studies.

Herakles then takes Katerina off
to her lodgings – it transpires some way out of town. Asked why, he explains
that a previous teacher had misbehaved herself. Katerina remarks that ‘The
house to which my guide led me was outside the village and rather far from the
school. But the countryside was beautiful. On one side was the sea, on the
other a plain, and in the distance towering blue mountains with summits
immaculate with snow.’

And her
landlady is welcoming. She is not Cretan but a refugee from Smyrna in 1922.
Herakles is not impressed by such people:‘All these refugees have houses and gardens,’snarled M. Herakles. ‘As
for me, a Cretan, I haven’t a roof to shelter me.’ And Katerina doesn’t care
for the distance from school or the accommodation offered and demands to be
taken elsewhere. Eventually she has to drag her way back to Mme Marika who
turns out to be a kindly woman, a seamstress with a bevy of apprentices.
Katerina eventually settles down there.

But the
teaching is a nightmare: there are 20 teachers for 1,000 pupils. That means
enormous classes, too many hours, totally unruly pupils – worse even than the
headmaster has painted them:there are
constant pitched battles and disruptions. To the French lessons are soon added
musical appreciation classes and they are more impossible even than the French
ones. In addition, Katerina finds that a false life story has been spread about
her by a malicious man whose motive she never gets to the bottom of. And the
inhabitants of Rethymnon are narrow-minded gossips only too ready to believe
the worst.

There is
one other woman teacher, Mlle Frosso, and they become friends Katerina recounts
how,

I told her my life story. I told her that our society was unjust
towards women who had no means of providing for themselves.

‘Yes, everything is unjust,’ she cried with fervour. ‘I’ve felt this
injustice since I was very young. My father reproached me for being a girl, and
he let my brothers do anything. For him, woman is a slave to man. That’s how my
mother lost her health. I heard my father say that he made her constantly
pregnant out of jealousy. It’s odious.’

Katerina is brave and determined and a good teacher;she begins to make some headway with French,
but music is beyond her pupils – apart from one small aspect:

One day, one of the older boys called out as I came into the classroom,
‘Here comes Madame Doremi!’

They all burst out laughing and the whole class cried, ‘Madame Doremi!
Madame Doremi!’

Should I pretend that I hadn’t heard? I was hardly
deaf! I felt hot and cold all over. Not because it displeased me to hear myself
called Madame Doremi, but it showed that I had no authority left. Should I get
angry? That would be worse! What could I do with these strapping fellows armed
with pistols? With what pleasure would they have made me feel fear! Distribute
slaps? Even if I had wanted to, their cheeks were out of my reach. Burst into
tears, as I was ready to do? In a flash I understood that it was best to remain
pleasant and accept my name with a smile.

The lads continued to call out, ‘Kalimera, Kiria Doremi, good day Madame Doremi.’

‘All right, good day children. You flatter me by
greeting me with these three musical notes;thank you very much for my surname. That way, you will not forget me too
quickly when I leave Crete.’

What with that, and an unpleasant incident in a cafe, the
chivalrous side of at least one of her pupils reveals itself. Lefteris, two
years older than her, reveals his love for her and soon she is in love with
him. He invites her to his village up in the mountains above Rethymnon and
there she meets not only his loving grandparents but also an unconventional
Englishwoman, Sally, who has settled there. Sally’s story of her welcome in the
village mirrors that offered to Katerina:

We arrived in the village at dawn. Everyone came
out to welcome us, and the grandmother, without knowing me, made ready a lovely
bedroom, sacrificed the finest chicken in honour of the stranger and treated me
like a princess. The following day, the villagers came with offerings:a basket of fruit, honey, handmade lace.
Surprised, I said that it wasn’t either Christmas or my birthday. ‘It’s our
custom,’ replied one of them. ‘You are visiting our village for the first time
...’ These were people more splendid than I had ever met! And so I decided to
rent a cheap little house, and to leave forever Rethymnon, so full of spiteful
bourgeois.

Herakles, meanwhile, is in love with the maid of the headmaster and his
invalid wife who, in turn, relies for her well-being on the ministrations of
Herakles. But another man has his eye on the maid and abducts her, in time
honoured tradition. As Katerina puts it, ‘In Crete, since the departure of the
Turks, there was nothing but abductions.’ A battle royal ensues. Herakles tries
to get his loved-one back and his side fights with the other, bullets fly.
Lefteris is wounded. Katerina is amazed by the reaction of her landlady’s
apprentices:

I went into the kitchen. The apprentices there were making tea made from
the aromatic plant gathered on the heights of Mt Ida. Laughing, they recounted
how a bullet had brushed past one
of them. According to them, they had taken part in a gentle battle of flowers!

Strange young Cretan women who have no fear of bullets, I
salute you!

When Lefteris’s bourgeois parents discover his intentions
towards Katerina, his father does everything he can to break it up. Katerina is
free-spirited and liberal-thinking enough herself, but the rumours put about by
her tormentor and her friendship with the atheist Sally, provide him with even
more ammunition. Even Mlle Frosso finds she can no longer risk friendship, as
she tells Katerina what is going on:

‘I know, I know but that’s what they’re saying. I tell you, my father
didn’t want me to accept your invitation for this afternoon. We need to hide if
we want to go on seeing each other.But
you are free to do what you want. Most important, don’t get angry, dear
Mademoiselle Katerina. I’m telling you as a friend so that you are forewarned. So
you won’t be surprised if ...

‘But to whom am I accountable for my private life, which is after all
so austere?’

‘ Oh, it’s always about those medieval prejudices
against women. If you knew how certain teachers hate us because we work. They
complain that we’re taking their jobs, and they judge us inferior to men.’

To add to Katerina’s teaching burden, she has been given a class of
girls to teach. She has, meanwhile, found a delightful walk up on the slopes of
the Fortezza where she meets some interesting women. She thinks how pleasant it
would be to take her class there. Unfortunately, she does not know that the
denizens of her discovery are prostitutes plying their trade. But before they
get back everyone else knows what has happened and the town is up in arms; even
the headmaster cannot save Katerina – she must leave. In case you can get hold
of a copy, I won’t spoil the end.

Katerina’s new
hill-side acquaintances or, rather, Lilika’s for, as she was later to tell
Deborah Tannen, even that part of her novel was true, brings me back to the
prostitutes of Rethymnon (p.244). Until relatively recently, the area just
below the Fortezza was the red light district. Then there was the discovery
there, in a hamam, in 1923, when the populations of Greeks and Turks were being
exchanged, of a bathhouse attendant called Fatma who turned out to be Madame
Hortense – she who had once entranced admirals and, when that caravan moved on,
worked as a prostitute in Chania . Brought out into the daylight from the
nether regions of the hamam to be deported, she told her story to the French
consul who ensured that she could stay. To wander through these alleys with
their often crumbling walls and time-worn carved doors is to get a feel of old
Rethymnon, the less gracious part, and number 25 Radamanthios Street used to be
a bathhouse; (it’s now in private hands). Definitely worth finding.

Herakleion (chapter 15)

(insert p. 183, just before
Mary Walker) Mary Walker saw Candia (Herakleion) as she arrived in Crete;she was seeing it from the sea and was
doubtless full of pleasurable anticipation. Anna Vivanti, ten years or so
earlier, was leaving after fulfilling a dream. Her account is less happy:

We walked through the town, which is a
desolate place – ten times too large for its inhabitants. Grass grows in all
the streets, and the very dogs seem more lean and hungry here than elsewhere.
The fine massive old Venetian walls that surround the harbour and town have
been cracked by earthquakes, and they seem unable to resist the general decay.
There are many palm-trees in Candia whose graceful forms rise up amidst the
ruin and desolation which surround them;and beyond the town, as in Canea, one sees a chain of snow-covered
mountains.

(South to the Mesara Plain –
Chapter 19)

Gortyn

(insert p.251, end of
penultimate paragraph) Europa and the Bull is, indeed, in the British Museum
but not yet on display. In 2005, Lesley Fitton (author of the fine Minoans (2002)), the curator concerned,
was kind enough to take us into the basement storage area. There Europa,
headless, armless but elegantly dressed, sat facing sideways, as is
traditional, on an animal that, quite honestly, looks more like a great sheep
than a bull. The statue was in much need of repair and cleaning. As I write, I
am happy to report that, two years later, Europa is a new woman – clean, better
adjusted on her bull, and probably ready to face her public by the end of
2007.We may yet see her sparkling in
the Great Court.

(Lasithi Plateau, chapter
22)

Trapeza cave

(insert p.299) More of the
Pendleburys’ first independent Lasithi excavation can be gleaned from a new
biography:The Rash Adventurer:A Life of
John Pendlebury (2007) by Imogen Grunden.Indeed, it emerges that Hilda later wrote up their time in Lasithi on
that occasion – now an uncatalogued item in the British School at Athens’
archives. Many of her letters there, which I used, are catalogued.

The team set up their dig house in nearby Tzermiado
(p. 299). The Trapeza cave had already been gone over by the villagers
searching for gold, complicating interpretation, but they could decide from
their finds that its use preceded that of the Diktaian cave (p. 295-8). The
name now on the signpost to lead the unwary astray – Kronia – was then given to
the cave by the villagers, determining that it must have been that of Zeus’
father Kronos.

A villager from Psychro (pp. 292-5), George
Markogiannakis, was in charge of the teenage pot-washing girls from Tzermiado.
Hilda wrote how ‘they teased and plagued him with their frivolous ways.’

At the end of the two week dig, Hilda and John set
off on a three-day walking trip and stayed first at George’s Psychro house. We
have met his daughter-in-law Ourania in 1962-3 at Palaikastro (p.370) where her
husband Manolis, the Knossos foreman, was supervisor. Ourania cooked for
archaeologists at Knossos in the 1950s and ‘60s, and she prepared the food that
Hilda and John took with them as they left on their walk in 1936. Hilda was to
write of their stay: ‘George had a delightful village house, with a terrace and
courtyard:our beds were spotlessly
clean but I shall never forget the rasp of Ourania’s homespun sheets on my
chin.’

(From Lato to Myrtos –
chapter 24)

Spinalonga

(insert p. 319 between Lato and Agios Nikolaos) The only place we have visited on the west coast of
the Bay of Mirabella is the administrative tourist centre of that region. But
the area north of Agios Nikolaos (pp.319-322), such as Elounda (pp. 76, 85,
321), has been developed for tourists in recent years. If anything were to
tempt a visitor there, it would be Victoria Hislop’s novel The Island (2005).

The story takes place in both the present day, as
one of the heroines, Alexis, a London career woman engaged to be married, goes
in search of her past, and in that past, starting in 1939. The setting then is
the village of Plaka, opposite the island of Spinalonga.

Traditionally, Spinalonga was the site of a Venetian
fortress built in 1579 on the ruins of an ancient acropolis. When Crete fell to
the Ottomans in 1669, refugees, including women and children, sheltered there,
and it did not capitulate until 1715. But from 1903 to 1957 the fortress housed
a leper colony.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, lepers
were treated as both Anna Vivanti and Mary Walker describe travelling westwards
out of Chania. Anna wrote in 1865:

When we were about a mile out of the city,
we came to the mud huts where the poor lepers live. These miserable creatures
lay or crouched before their doors, and stretched their mutilated hands out
towards us, begging for alms. My husband threw a few piasters among them, but I
turned my face away, for they were frightful to look at.

A decade or so later Mary
added:

The winding road takes us under the shade of
a few trees, as we pass through the picturesque but melancholy leper village.
Many victims of that hideous malady, most of them wrapped in great hooded
cloaks, the hood drawn down, sit under the trees, or crouch by the wayside,
begging, more as a semblance of occupation, in most case, than necessity, for a
liberal allowance of bread is regularly made by the Government, and many of the
lepers own property, the proceeds of which are brought by their friends and
placed on a stone of the well that stands in the centre of the cluster of
square whitewashed huts.

The leper colony on
Spinalonga is a sad place that the villagers of VictoriaHislop’s Plaka try not to think about. But the fisherman Georgiou
Pekakis is a humane man and when he undertakes to convey some poor unfortunate into
permanent exile on the island, he is as sympathetic as possible. Then one day
he has to carry a member of his own family consisting of his wife Eleni, the
village teacher, and their two daughters.

Alexis is directly related to this family. That is
the crux of the story – to tell you more would be to spoil a moving, engrossing
and dramatic book. But I can give you a flavour of it from one evocative
quotation about the two daughters – Maria aged 10 and Anna 12 at the start of
the story – and their friend Fortini who, in her old age, helps Alexis unravel
her family’s past:

The girls were heiresses to a millennium of
secretly evolved folklore and were now considered old enough to be taught the
crafts and skills that had been handed down through generations without written
record. Fortini’s grandmother was a great source of such lore and showed them
how to dye wool with extracts of iris, hibiscus and chrysanthemum petals, and
how to weave coloured grasses into elaborate baskets and mats. Other women
passed on to them their knowledge of the magical benefits of locally grown
herbs, and they would walk far into the mountains to find wild sage, cistus and
camomile for their healing powers. On a good day they would return with a
basket of the most precious herb of all, origanum dictamus, which was said to heal wounds as well as
cure sore throats and stomach problems. Maria would always have the right
potion to minister to her father if he was sick, and soon her reputation for
mixing useful remedies spread round the village.

While they were on their long walks into the
mountains they would gather horta,
the iron-rich mountain greens that were a staple part of every diet.

In the days before all this
area was fully opened up to tourism, it was the setting of Daphne du Maurier’s
story ‘Not After Midnight’, originally published in 1959 in The Breaking Point. I found it in a
compilation Don’t Look Now: And Other
Stories (1973).

Archaeological artefacts are, not surprisingly,
behind this tale of skulduggery. It’s not quite Rebecca but it is taut enough and nicely atmospheric. Our hero, a
schoolmaster on holiday with his easel who gets himself into the soup through
nosiness, writes:

I followed the winding road to the left of
the hotel, and having climbed for several kilometres descended again from the
hills to sea level, where the land on my right suddenly flattened out to what
seemed to be a great stretch of dried marsh, sun-baked, putty-coloured, the
dazzling blue of the sea affording a splendid contrast as it lapped the stretch
of land on either side. Driving closer I saw that it was not marsh at all but
salt flats, with narrow causeways running between them, the flats themselves
contained by walls intersected by dykes to allow the sea-water to drain,
leaving the salt behind. ... then the salt flats ended abruptly, and the land
rose once more to form the long, narrow isthmus of Spinalongha beyond.

The narrator sets up his
easel and then sees something suspicious. One evening he follows the couple he
suspects into Agios Nikolaos:

I paid for my lemonade, and strolled to the
end of the quay and back – the line upon line of fishing-boats would be
colourful by day, and possibly the scene worth painting – and then I crossed
the street, my eye caught by a glint of water inland, where a side-road
appeared to end in a cul-de-sac. This must be the feature mentioned in the
guidebook as the Bottomless Pool much frequented by tourists in the high season
[p.320]. It was larger than I had expected, quite a sizeable lake, the water
full of scum and floating debris, and I did not envy those who had the temerity
to use the diving-board at the further end of it by day.

Then
I saw the Mercedes. ...

Harriet Boyd and the Americans – chapter 25;

Gournia

(insert p. 344; add at end of
Dorothea Bate quotation) We also know, from Karolyn Shindler’s biography of
Dorothea Bate, what Edith Hall thought of their visitor. Edith wrote to her
parents on 29 May 1904:

The Miss Bates [sic] I spoke of is one of
the jolliest, most capable, and fearless girls I ever knew. She is interested
in palaeontology, and is digging caves to get bones ... She goes about by
herself with one native to guide and help manage her luggage. And the beauty of
it is that she is entirely unconscious and girlish, she dresses well, and is
altogether a most companionable person.

That view of Dorothea allows
her biographer to quash, in a footnote, a myth concerning her subject –
certainly one that I was keen to know the truth of:

I was fascinated at the idea of Dorothea
dressing well in the middle of Crete, given the primitive nature of her
accommodation. Edith’s letter also serves to dispose of another erroneous
story, which has had some currency. According to this one, Dorothea rode around
Crete dressed as a man. There is not even a hint in her diary of anything that
could even remotely account for this, nor in any known letters. It is a
splendidly romantic notion but ... without foundation.

(East Crete – Chapter 26)

Zakros

(insert p.56, end of penultimate
paragraph and p. 378, end of penultimate paragraph) The sites excavated in the
wider area of the Zakros Minoan palace by the ‘Minoan Road Gang’, starting in
1984, adds to the evidence for the theory that the Minoans may not have been as
peaceable as has previously been assumed. When I mentioned (p. 56) that
archaeologist Stella Chryssoulaki had drawn conclusions from the strong walls
seen when she was a child travelling with her father, a civil engineer
constructing the road system of Crete during the sixties and seventies, I was
inadvertently running together two stories, one from childhood, another from
her work as an archaeologist.

Since Stella
(Head of the Educational Programme and Communications Department of the
Hellenic Ministry of Culture in Athens) contacted me and sent me material, I am
better informed. What she learned as a child were such principles as how to
trace a land communication, so that it was easier to detect the Minoan roads
when she and her team started their surface surveying.

The ‘Minoan Road Gang’ consisted originally of
Stella, team leader, two other women archaeologists – Maria Avgouli and Yianna
Venieri – and the architect Liana Kyriopoulou. Their story is most simply told
in a summer 1992 article for the general reader by Diana Farr Ladas – ‘Of Women
and Minoan Watchtowers’. It describes how the team set out to explore on foot
‘the Minoan Road system’ in Eastern Crete and what they found. As Diana writes,

The women had ‘tripped over’ an intricate
system of 60 forts and watchtowers, defence walls and military roads in the
area of the palace at Zakros. Many of the roads went nowhere near the palace,
zigzagging instead to odd locations to provide links to the forts. ...

Today, nothing remains but the foundations,
sometimes reaching up to window level, but their height has been estimated at 5
to 6 metres. Each tower was in visual range of the next, so that it would have
been impossible for anyone to pass through the region undetected.

Before the article was
written, the team had excavated five and a half towers and unearthed artefacts
that could have been used by military men camped there. As Stella explained to
the author, ‘Strangely enough, the finds dating from the New Palace period show
signs of every day rather than military life. After the destruction of the Old
Palaces by earthquakes and fire around 1750 [BC], the forts were never used
again for defensive purposes.’ And Diana adds,

Looking over the history of Crete, Stella
Chryssoulaki feels that the early defences may have been intended just as much
to keep the local population at bay as to ward off intruders from across the
seas. The Cretans were practically never united;warring tribes, bickering city-states were
much more the rule. The palaces at Knossos, Mallia and elsewhere seem to have
been widely fortified in their first phase (though this has yet to be
systematically studied).

The failure to rebuild them may suggest that Crete at last had a
powerful ruler who decreed wall-less cities in order to have more control over
their occupants.

The ‘Road Gang’, now joined by male colleagues, as
well as other women, from Greece, Italy, Germany, England and the Czech
Republic have continued their excavations though, not unnaturally, the harmony
and happiness of the past ‘heroic’ days of the initial ‘Road Gang’ cannot be
the same. Their findings are made public through conference papers and in
learned journals.